Board Spotlight: Marisa Martin

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Meet Marisa! She’s definitely the most energetic person you’ll meet today (or this month), so you know we’re super-lucky to have her as our Membership Director.

Born in Kansas and raised in New Jersey, Marisa found herself in Baltimore for college. She started out as a bio/psych major, pursuing her need to figure out how and what makes people tick. As a kid, she constantly doodled in notebooks but never thought much of it…but by her senior year, she’d found her calling in graphic design and had fallen in love with Charm City.

Ask her what she loves about design and she’ll say it’s all about the people.

“I love being able to connect with others through my work,” she says. “From designing a website to a printed piece, translating ideas into words and images, and then communicating with others through that end result, is the ultimate thrill for me.”

Marisa’s love of design and being social translates well to her role on the board. “Being on the board is great because I get to be part of a solid community of designers. I want to help change the perception of designers within society. Designers should be strategists and leaders who shape the world and make it a better place to be, not just people who simply make pretty things. With the local and national support of AIGA, I think we can do that!”

On the list of her many influences, Marisa has found both inspiration and comfort in a letter written by Jean-Paul Sartre. In this letter he writes, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours. And let’s do it with everything.” It serves as a reminder be true to herself⏤to grab life by the horns and make the most out of it. She says, “You may not be in your ideal situation, but you have the power to work your way there!”

When Marisa isn’t designing, playing field hockey or jamming to music, she dreams of traveling. “I want to go everywhere and see everything. There’s no place not on my list to visit. I want to learn what makes other people tick and how they work, think and react.” Marisa’s favorite part about traveling: putting herself in someone else’s shoes and understanding how they live.

And if she had to create an ice cream flavor that captured the spirit of Charm City, she’d serve up a scoop of steamed crab Old Bay ice cream in a Berger cookie cone!

Board Spotlight: Kate Lawless

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Kate Lawless loves design because of its visual connections to words. She loves Baltimore because it’s a vibrant and weird city. This is the perfect storm for her role as AIGA Baltimore’s social media chair. When not gardening, crafting, cooking, or tweeting, she’s working as a designer at University of Maryland Faculty Physicians, Inc., creating eLearning modules, print materials, and digital signage.

Kate says she wanted to join our board to give back to the creative community while working to strengthen it. She says, “It’s a bonus that our meetings are held in bars, so I have a beer with designer friends frequently.”

When pressed for details about her “vibrant and crazy” thoughts on Baltimore, she says, “I know of this place called WC Harlan, a 1920’s style speakeasy bar, but I promised not to say where it is.” And while she loves the city’s ‘crab’ symbolism, she’d update the iconography to be more a celebration of the row home.

Currently, she’s listening to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. We asked her for a critique of the album’s cover.

“It’s too robotic,” she said, “Not enough punk and funk. I would start with the black background, definitely keeping it dark, but adding in some zags or blasts of color in an abstract composition with a spray paint texture.”

Got questions for Kate about AIGA Baltimore’s social media? Email her at socialmedia@baltimore.aiga.org.

AIGA Washington,DC Presents Post Typography

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

Our pals in DC are offering up the ultimate party: a night of design and music featuring Baltimore duo Post Typography. The award-winning designers will present their ‘Greatest Misses,’ then deliver their ‘greatest hits’ at the first-class music venue, The Fillmore Silver Spring. Check it out this Thursday at 7 pm!

The design studio’s principals, Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen, will give a behind-the-scenes peek at the design process, illustrated with projects that fell short, missed the mark, or were blown off-target by the fickle winds of client taste.

Originally conceived as an avant-garde anti-design movement, Post Typography specializes in graphic design, conceptual typography, and custom lettering/illustration with additional forays into art, apparel, music, curatorial work, design theory, and vandalism.

They’ll turn up the volume after the lecture for two sets of music featuring Strals and Willen: first instrumental duo Peals, then fiery punk band Pure Junk.

The lecture and concert will cost $14 and is an all-ages show. Registration for this event closes on January 16th at noon. Tickets will be sold day of the event, at the door, for $16 with an additional $1 service charge.

Get the full low down from AIGA Washington, DC.

HOW Interactive Conference 2013: Tools & Resources

Posted on by AIGA Baltimore

When I first set out to write about what I learned over 3 fabulous days at the HOW Interactive Design Conference in Chicago, I realized (as I sifted through pages and pages of notes) that what’s needed here isn’t another recap of sound bites from the event. What I usually hear from design conference attendees is “it was good but I was expecting more” or “I had a great time but it only reinforced what I already knew.” If you’ve scoured hundreds of articles, blogs, and books about how to be a better designer then you don’t need to learn more, you need to do more. So, with this article, I figured you’d want tools to get the job done.

I’ve put together the tools and resources that the speakers shared at HOW, some of which are free.

PROTOTYPING & WIREFRAME TOOLS

sketches

Axure.com
Make interactive wireframe and prototypes without writing code.

UIStencils.com
Get the tools you need to sketch any type of prototype with pen and paper. Check out this iPhone Stencil Kit!

Protosketch
Build fully-interactive prototypes from your UI Stencil Sketches.

FluidUI.com
Design working mockups for mobile and tablet apps in the browser to share instantly.

Invision
Quickly share a mockup or demo a mobile app with this prototyping and collaboration tool for designers.

Flinto
Make your designs interactive. Create iOS prototypes with your rough sketches or final mock-ups. This tool adds interactivity by linking screens so you can quickly share with your client.

Skala preview
Send pixel perfect previews from your Mac to as many devices as you like. And if you’re working in Photoshop CS5 or higher, you can preview as you edit.

Codiga
A cloud-based drag-and-drop mobile interface builder. Import your own code or choose from their JQuery powered library of components.

Wirify.com
Convert any web page into a wireframe. The PRO version lets you export and edit the wireframes into a variety of formats.

Sketch
A vector graphics app (Mac only) for web and UI design. Render text, create artboards, and use its adjustable 960 grid for wireframes. Using Sketch Mirror, you can preview your work on your iPhone and tablet over Wi-Fi.

USABILITY TESTING

Silverback
Usability testing software for designers and developers. Screen capture, record live video & audio of your users testing your website.

Optimizely
Website Optimization and A/B Testing

UXrecorder
Mobile Website Testing for iOS

DESIGNING & BUILDING

Chris Butler

Macaw
Tired of designing in Photoshop and Illustrator? This web design tool writes code as you draw it.

Codrops
A web design and development blog that publishes articles and tutorials on the latest trends and techniques.

Hammer.js
Javascript library for multi-touch gestures.

Adobe Generator for Photoshop CC
Create image assets in real time.

Adobe Edge Reflow
Design responsive CSS layouts for all screen sizes and export to an HTML code editor with Adobe Edge Reflow CC.

Communication is Key

BOOKS, BLOGS, AND MORE…

Want to know more? Here are some books from the HOW speakers themselves. If I hadn’t brought all carry-on luggage, I might have bought every one of these. Thank goodness for the internet.

Patrick McNeal – Twitter
Creator of designmeltodown.com
Session:  What You Need to Know To Be An Effective Web Designer
Books: The Mobile Web Designer’s Idea Book, The Web Designer’s Idea Book

Chris Converse – Twitter
Codify Design Studio
Session: How to Turn Your PSD Documents into Web Pages
Some Great Resources and Templates can be found here

James Victore – Twitter | YouTube
Keynote Speaker
Book: Victore or, Who Died and Made You Boss?

James Pannafino
Associate Professor, Millersville University
Session: Interdisciplinary Approach to Interactive Design
Book: Interdisciplinary Interaction Design

Chris Butler – Twitter | Blog
COO, Newfangled
Session: Master (minding) the Process: Presentation Slides
Book: The Strategic Web Designer

Margot Bloomstein – Twitter
Principal, Appropriate, Inc.
Session:  Making Meaning in Content and Design – Presentation Slides
Book: Content Strategy at Work

Todd Zaki Warfel
Co-Founder, Nimbly App
Session: Interactive Prototyping & Exploration of Standard Prototyping Tools
Book:  Prototyping A Practitioner’s Guide

Terry White, Sr.
Worldwide Evangelist, Adobe
Session: Create HTML Websites, iPad Apps and eBooks Without Writing Code
Tutorials

Cameron Moll
Founder, Authentic Jobs
Session: Visual Execution of Branding Across Platforms
Books: CSS Mastery , Mobile Web Design

Christopher Cannon
Senior Designer, Bloomberg
Session: Designing Data: How to Create Meaningful Visualizations – Presentation Slides

Brian Wood
Co-Owner, AskBrianWood.com
Session: Bridging the Designer/Developer Divide

David Sherwin – Blog
Principal Designer, frog
Session: Using Storytelling Techniques to Create Better Interactive Experiences
Book: Success By Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers

Dan Rhatigan
Type Director, Monotype
Session: Tailored Type for Screens – Website

Want a play by play of the event? Here’s a beautiful summary of the social media from the conference as it happened.

Have you used some of these? Do you have something to add? We want to hear about them!

Jennifer Marin is the co-president of AIGA Baltimore and she clearly loves resources.